‘Becoming Warren Buffett’: The Awakening of an Oracle

Early on in HBO’s new documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, there’s a scene of Buffett driving to work on the same route he has taken for 54 years. As he does every morning, Buffett goes through the drive-thru of a McDonald’s for breakfast and explains to the audience his daily breakfast ritual. Each morning, he has his wife set aside either $2.61, $2.95, or $3.17 depending on how prosperous he’s feeling that morning and that amount determines which breakfast he gets; the most humble choice, two sausage patties, costs $2.61, while the bacon egg and cheese biscuit rings in at $3.17. Buffett chooses the latter only when he feels like splurging. It’s a fascinating way to begin telling the story of a man worth between $60 and $70 billion dollars on any given day who won’t waste an extra fifty cents on a bacon egg and cheese biscuit if he doesn’t feel like he’s earned it.

Arguably the greatest living investor on the planet, Warren Buffett is the subject of this excellent new documentary from Emmy-nominated director Peter Kunhardt, a film that explores not just the accomplishments and history of the famed Oracle of Omaha, but the impact those events and the people in his life had on making him who he is today. It’s a refreshing approach to telling an extraordinary life story and far more interesting than just listing his various business successes one after the other. The audience knows Warren is rich, they might even have a decent idea of how he became rich, but the audience likely doesn’t know Warren Buffett the person, or how he became that person. By utilizing his personal home videos and interviewing the friends and family that have shared his journey through life, HBO gives us an intimate look at Buffett’s life and there is much to learn and appreciate.

Buffett begins his story by explaining that he has loved numbers since childhood; he’s been constantly calculating everything around him as long as he can remember. He applied this acumen when he started selling gum and soda door to door at an early age, displaying his streak for entrepreneurship and a reverence for compound interest when the other children his age were content playing marbles. His father was a businessman as well, and Warren would often find himself in his dad’s office reading every book he could find on investing. Buffett explains his father wasn’t consumed by making money, but rather, he viewed money as a way of keeping score, a viewpoint Warren would clearly go on to inherit.

His father was a huge influence, with Buffett sharing an anecdote about a time he and some friends tried running away from home until they were found by police and returned home. Buffett tells us his father looked at him and said, “You can do better than this” and Warren’s voice falters as he recounts that moment, with the experience of feeling he had let his father down clearly having had a profound impact. Warren explains this as an example of his father teaching him not by telling, but by example, and says his father had unlimited confidence in him which he attributes to going a long way in motivating him to succeed. Buffett sums up his relationship with his father by stating the best gift he had ever been given was his father when he was born.

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At 16, Warren Buffett had already graduated high school, and he had little interest in college; he was happy enough just buying and selling stocks. He ultimately attended Nebraska, and rushed through in 3 years before applying to Harvard Business School. Harvard contacted him for an interview, but after ten minutes, the interviewer told Warren he didn’t think he was Harvard material. Given such a setback, Buffett then says it was actually one of the best things to happen to him, as he found out the authors of a book he loved would be teaching a course at Columbia Business School, and after writing to them he was granted admission. That course taught by the legendary Ben Graham would form the foundation of Warren’s investment strategy of value investing, the key to his success in business.

After business school, Warren experiences a life changing event, saying the two turning points in his life were when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife Susie. Buffett’s sisters are interviewed and describe how Warren was completely taken by Susie, a balancing force in his life who helped ground him and connect him to the world when he was previously consumed only by numbers and the abstract. Susie helped Warren see and appreciate the world beyond quantitative terms, especially in regards to social and political issues. It was Susie who awoke in Warren his interest in philanthropy and understanding the plight of his fellow man. After his father’s passing, a right wing ideologue and Republican congressman, Warren felt free to expand his political beliefs, and with Susie, became focused on the civil rights movement. Together they attended a Martin Luther King Jr rally and heard a speech that would have a profound impact on Warren. In an interview, Susie notes how impressed she was by Warren when he expressed to her how he felt society was holding women back from realizing their potential and by extension the country was unable to realize its full potential as long as it didn’t empower women.

Witnessing Warren Buffett’s transformation from a shy introverted quant into a philanthropist comfortable in his own skin is a captivating one that Becoming Warren Buffet provides us. By the end of the film, from the interviews with friends and family as well as anecdotes from Warren himself, we have been given us insight necessary to understanding who Buffett is today, not a man defined by his billions of dollars, but by his gratitude and humility for the life he has led.

A closing anecdote from him is the one that stuck with me most. Buffett states that he is in his position as a matter of luck; when he was born in 1930, the odds of a child being born in America (as opposed to another part of the world) were about 40:1, adding he was born male, making the odds 80:1 of being a born a male in America. He attributes much of his fortune to the luck of winning “the ovarian lottery” — being born a citizen of the United States. Buffett says it provided him the opportunity to succeed, and that for people today to think this luck makes them superior in any way to other people in the world —rather than being grateful— is something he can’t understand; a lesson for all of us made all the more powerful given the state of affairs in our world today.

Comfortably Smug is a government relations professional with a focus on the financial services industry. He can be found on Twitter with his musings on all things finance and politics at @ComfortablySmug